Kate Bingham

More than a thousand buds have arrived in the garden. Yesterday I looked and there were none. Tangled into a slump of sullen green and bursting with sap they’ve over-run the armandii buddleia jasmine vine and cluster by cluster flick their swollen thumbs or sit on their fingers waiting to open, point their beaks up

My love arrived with tulips, ‘ten for a fiver’, picked up from the supermarket at the end of the street. Fresh off the plane, perhaps he would have preferred to wash his hands but stood in his coat in the kitchen watching me cut through the cellophane and crush the stems with the stainless heel